Dreamer Tapa blanda - 1999

Winner of the National Book Award

A novel in the honorable tradition of Billy Budd and Moby Dickheroic in proportion fiction that hooks into the mind. The New York Times Book Review

Long after wed stopped believing in the great American novel, along comes a spellbinding adventure story that may be just that. Chicago Tribune

Its a joy to read fiction in which there is a cultivated vision at work...the greatest victory of Dreamer is the light it shines on the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Dennis McFarland, The New York Times Book Review

In their remarkable simplicity these stories reach into...the African American experience with surprising freshness and the fluency of years of gathered wisdom. This book is a deeply satisfying reading adventure. Black Issues Book Review

I knocked on his open bedroom door.

Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.